Since BW Labs 2.0 we’ve hired 3 new team members to work on our next Unity project (details coming soon), and we’ve been working like crazy on the 3.0 site and our little side project. Finally we’re putting the robot kit sales to use!

Me and the others have been writing disturbingly large quantities of artificial intelligence code which we hope to show of in a demo soon. When we have something semi-polished it’ll be playable in browser and open for critique.

Brennon

A Cambridge student named Qui Pan has built a fantastic program that lets the user scan any desktop object with only a webcam. The computer generates a 3D model in real time, all you have to do is move the object in 360 degrees on your desk. This gets me really excited as this would be the perfect way to get 3D models into Unity games. Rather than paying $20 for a 3D model of a water bottle to use as a prop in a game, I could go out and buy a real bottle for $1, scan it, and import it into my game- no $1,000 laser scanner required.

[or watch this video here]

Micro

I’ve been able to spend a little more time this week coding my 3D game, but only for about 30 minutes, which is about 3 minutes in “coding time”. I was able to spend about 3 hours this weekend working with an Arduino microcontroller, and hopefully I’ll get on to more advanced Arduino projects later, but for now I only did enough to get the basics down.

It’s been a pretty good week for the BW Science Labs Store, the Vivus the Robot kit has sold really well, and sales are going up with Christmas coming ’round the corner.

With only 2 days left in school until Thanksgiving break, teachers feel the need to give us loads of exams so we can earn our freedom through hours of grueling tests.

I’ve been wondering for several months now if I should buy an Arduino, the relatively low cost microcontroller that has hobby engineers going wild (seriously, wild. You would not believe how much someone can love a computer chip until you’ve seen the die hard Arduino fans). Fortunately, my school’s ASR (Applied Science Research) teacher let me borrow an Arduino for the weekend. I’ve only had a couple hours to tinker with it, but so far I’ve been very impressed by both the Atmega 328 (the chip) and the design of the board. I’ve had the chance to sift through some of the documentation on the Arduino site, and my favorite tutorial so far has been the Melody tutorial.

Setup was quick and easy, once you get the hang on which pins do what, and yielded a pretty annoying little song (but still pretty cool).

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that there should be more videos on BW Science Labs, so here’s one I shot of my borrowed Arduino playing “Marry Had a Little Lamb”.

I only recorded this once, even though it plays in a loop. After about two or three times of playing “Marry Had a Little Lamb” you start to lose your mind.

And for those of you too lazy to click on the link above, here’s the code I used to make this happen:

int speakerPin = 9;

int length = 15; // the number of notes
char notes[] = “ccggaagffeeddc “; // a space represents a rest
int beats[] = { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 4 };
int tempo = 300;

void playTone(int tone, int duration) {
for (long i = 0; i < duration * 1000L; i += tone * 2) {
digitalWrite(speakerPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(tone);
digitalWrite(speakerPin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(tone);
}
}

void playNote(char note, int duration) {
char names[] = { ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘C’ };
int tones[] = { 1915, 1700, 1519, 1432, 1275, 1136, 1014, 956 };

// play the tone corresponding to the note name
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
if (names[i] == note) {
playTone(tones[i], duration);
}
}
}

void setup() {
pinMode(speakerPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
if (notes[i] == ‘ ‘) {
delay(beats[i] * tempo); // rest
} else {
playNote(notes[i], beats[i] * tempo);
}

// pause between notes
delay(tempo / 2);
}
}

Micro

Speaking of Unity, I’ve been working on my own little project, and here are a few photos of the in game artwork.

The 3D city I have is pretty darn big and it’s exciting to finally be working on a fully 3D project. This game is just a way for me to learn 3D programming by doing. I admit it really is just another first person shooter, but once I get the coding down I’ll be able to work on some more creative projects.

I’m slowing store product development for now as I’m setting aside money to get a new BW Science Labs site. Once that’s finished I expect to develop an explosion of awesome new products.

I’ve been getting some feedback from people who have bought the Vivus the Robot Kit from the BW Science Labs Store and aside from a little constructive criticism, the feedback has been really good. It’s nice to know that people all over the world (and I really do mean all over) are putting together the kit and its not exploding it their faces. When people are putting together a robot you never know what will happen, they skip one step and it becomes aware, building armies of itself and setting its advanced mind on world domination. Well, actually that would be kinda cool, but you get the idea.

Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, everywhere.

If you’re interested in building a Unity 3D game, consider these questions:

1) What will the user get out of the game afterwards?

This is a rare question for coders to ask, as most projects involve the player mindlessly blasting wave after wave of zombies then looking up and realizing that its 8:00 PM on Sunday and they have exams on Monday. I plan of adding bits and pieces of fun info in future projects, even just using the word “microcontroller” is a robot game is a starting point.

2) Are there other games out their like yours?

Making something truly unique is the Indie developer’s only chance to really compete with major game companies like Ubisoft.

3) Is there a component that actually makes the player think?

Think… What is this foreign word? Giving the player the chance to use their brain can really be a big plus to your game.

In some earlier posts several months ago I discussed cyber warfare, something that just made big headlines. In tonight’s 60 minutes, some interesting news has arisen. Apparently, Brazil has been attacked multiple times by cyber terrorists, and specialists say that America is a risk.

I have a hard time going without power for 3 hours, imagine what would happen if the entire west or east coast lost power for lord knows how long at a time. Fortunately, Obama is allocating more funds for cyber security, I hope that that’s enough.

Micro

I’ve spent the week looking for a good web developer to help me redo the BW Science Labs website, but I haven’t found anyone yet. In the meantime I’ve made some progress on Unity development, and I’m now comfortable with the scripting language. As always though, most of my time goes to school, which reminds me of a t shirt I saw labeled “Homework kills trees, stop the madness!”. It would be fun to see the carbon footprint of one year of homework. I’ll have to look into that.

I agree that there is a future for hardware, however we still have a long way to go coding-wise with what we’ve currently got. For instance, the UAV I mentioned above has some things that code needs to fix. When the plane is flying over a green field, wouldn’t the sunlight reflect off of the grass and get picked up by the color sensor as a different color? I don’t know of any color sensors that can correct this, though it is possible to fix through coding.

Another example, Artificial Intelligence. Let’s face it, our AI coding needs work, making robots and software “smart” is one of the hardest things to do, because the coder has to teach the program to learn. There is far too much logic to code to be done in one fellow swoop (in fact, one such software company did try to code every piece of logic a child has, like water is wet, fire is hot, and so on. Many of their coders quit, one claimed that they were “working day and night to create a shadow of what we originally promised”.). I won’t be satisfied with our AI until we’ve got a working HAL 9000, complete with the drive to take us over.

AI is something I really want to work on, as there’s still a lot of progress to make. I’m sure I’ll be happy I chose to go into AI programming until the day I ask my computer:
Me: “Open the bay doors!”
Computer: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Brennon.”

Global

I order my electronics components from all over, but one place in particular that I could not be without is Sparkfun. Also, having met some of the Sparkfun employees at the Maker Fair ’09 its nice ordering from a small, friendly company with a face. Unfortunately, starting early this week, Sparkfun is being sued by SPARC International, a large company owned by Sun Microsystems that sells servers. Apparently, SPARC’s legal department decided that Sparkfun sounded too much like SPARC, so legal warfare has begun. If Sun (SPARC) spent more of its time and money developing new technologies and less of it bullying smaller businesses, they would probably not be dying such a slow and painful death.

Micro

As I said its been a busy week. I’ve had a little time to look into Unity, but not much. So far so good.

For those of you who don’t know, Unity 3D is a really powerful enviornment that allows developers to create interactive 3D content. It can be embedded in a web page like Flash, or made as a download for Mac or PC.

Unity 3D originally has been $199 for the Indie (independent developer, kind of like Lite), and the pro version has been $1499. There’s also an iPhone and Wii tool available for an elevated cost. Now there’s a few reasons why I did not buy this earlier:

1) cost

2) I already own Flash CS4

3) I’m really bad at art, so I’d need a 3D artist, preferably someone I could get away with paying really little (least I’m honest)

However, now that it’s free, I might as well download it.

I haven’t had more than a few minutes to play with it, but so far it seems pretty awesome. It seems like it has a pretty big learning curve, and I’m inept with 3D art by nature. I’ll also need to be careful about investing my time in Unity, as I need to keep up with all my other favorite programming languages and projects.

I really do feel bad for the guy who downloaded this the day before it became free.

Download Unity 3D